See You in Richmond

Beginning tomorrow morning around 8:45am you can view a live webcast of Virginia’s first “Signature Conference” commemorating the Civil War Sesquicentennial from the Robbins Center at the University of Richmond. You can also follow the day’s events right here at Civil War Memory where I will be live blogging beginning with Edward L. Ayers’s opening remarks right up until the final Q&A. I will be sitting with the rest of the media in a special section of the Robbins Center, along with 2,000 people from around the country. We will have access to all of the panelists as well as conference organizers. For those of you who do have the time to view the webcast you can submit questions to panelists in one of two ways. You can email directly to historians@richmond.edu or you can submit them directly to me at kevlvn@aol.com after which they will be forwarded. I was hoping to do a few video interviews with my new hand held, but I haven’t had enough time to get accustomed to its features since unwrapping it on Saturday. I do plan on taking plenty of photographs and I will also be Twittering throughout the day, which you can follow at http://twitter.com/KevinLevin [Tweets will be organized with the hashtag, #cws09]. The format of each session will force panelists to acknowledge the contingency that colored events in 1859. Panelists will have to discuss the significance of events without referring to their causal connection to future events. We shall see if they can stick with such strict conditions. This promises to be an exciting and educational day for all of those who can attend and for those of you who will be watching via the Internet.